Houdini Core

Houdini Core combines superior performance and dramatic, ease-of-use to deliver a powerful and accessible 3D animation experience to CG artists creating feature films, commercials or video games. With its procedural node-based workflow, Houdini Core lets you create more content faster to reduce timelines and enjoy enhanced flexibility in all your creative tasks. Houdini Core is ideal for modelers, lighters, character riggers and animators to use on its own or as a layout and lighting tool for visual effects created in Houdini FX.

My first two weeks of using Houdini in production, I couldn't stop smiling! Everything is so much faster and easier.

by Szymon Kapeniak | CG Supervisor | Human Ark

MODELING | Houdini includes a wide variety of polygon, NURBS and subdivision surface modeling tools. Procedural techniques can be used to maintain a robust construction history and to create complex models such as environments.

CLOUDS & VOLUMES | The Cloud FX tools offer an artist-friendly way of building, sculpting and rendering cloud formations. This workflow utilizes sparse volume sculpting tools created as part of the OpenVDB open source initiative.

ANIMATION | Houdini has an animator-friendly workflow which includes a channel editor, dope sheet and interactive timeline. Set keyframes on any parameter or use Houdini’s Advanced Motion-editing tools for even more control.

CHARACTER RIGGING |Houdini’s node-based approach fits perfectly with the working methodology of a typical character rigging TD. Characters can then be wrapped up into a single Digital Asset node and delivered to the animation team.

LIGHTING | Houdini’s lighting workflow provides a flexible and powerful environment for managing lights, building shaders and defining the look of a shot. Environment and GI lights work well with Mantra’s physically-based rendering.

MANTRA RENDERING | With Houdini, you can rely on a robust built-in rendering solution called Mantra or create custom support for a wide variety of third party renderers. Mantra is particularly good at rendering volumes such as smoke.

COMPOSITING | Houdini includes a node-based compositor which is perfect for creating slap comps. Lighters can test out render passes before sending plates to artists working with other compositing apps.

HOUDINI DIGITAL ASSETS | Create Houdini Digital Assets for use in Houdini or other apps via the Houdini engine. Assets from Houdini FX can be opened up and manipulated in Houdini Core.

INTEROPERABILITY | Import and export to a variety of formats including Alembic, FBX, OBJ, OpenEXR and more.